Well you've brought up a good point about a lot of development that's going on under linux right now. IMHO the best way to ensure that we don't damn ourselves to dll hell is by setting up a set of requirements that all library authors have to follow.
First of all, the interface to all functions and classes in a shared library MUST be backwards compatible with previous versions.
Secondly, some sort of package manager, that could connect to an online repository containing every major shared library (something like CPAN) in order to ensure that libraries can be acquired, upgraded, and repaired easily without reinstalling a product.
A third solution to the DLL problem would be for an application to store all the libraries it uses within its own tree. Although this is redundant since several programs may use the same shared library, it ensures that an application's libraries will never be affected by the installation or removal of other applications on the same system.
Basically, to all you developpers, if you're going to use shared libraries in your products, be responsible with them and never assume your app is the only one on the system.
-Mike
At Marianopolis College students are sometimes asked to submit diskettes with their papers saved in MS Word format. Supposedly, these papers are kept on record for a number of years and referenced against all other papers submitted in order to discourage plaigiarism.
But that's just what they tell US. Those disks probably end up storing some prof's porn collection.
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Well you've brought up a good point about a lot of development that's going on under linux right now. IMHO the best way to ensure that we don't damn ourselves to dll hell is by setting up a set of requirements that all library authors have to follow.
First of all, the interface to all functions and classes in a shared library MUST be backwards compatible with previous versions.
Secondly, some sort of package manager, that could connect to an online repository containing every major shared library (something like CPAN) in order to ensure that libraries can be acquired, upgraded, and repaired easily without reinstalling a product.
A third solution to the DLL problem would be for an application to store all the libraries it uses within its own tree. Although this is redundant since several programs may use the same shared library, it ensures that an application's libraries will never be affected by the installation or removal of other applications on the same system.
Basically, to all you developpers, if you're going to use shared libraries in your products, be responsible with them and never assume your app is the only one on the system. -Mike
At Marianopolis College students are sometimes asked to submit diskettes with their papers saved in MS Word format. Supposedly, these papers are kept on record for a number of years and referenced against all other papers submitted in order to discourage plaigiarism. But that's just what they tell US. Those disks probably end up storing some prof's porn collection.